


The Lost Queen

by lionessvalenti



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 01, Alternate Universe, Ensemble Cast, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-01 17:32:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15148262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/pseuds/lionessvalenti
Summary: When Quentin's childhood best friend disappeared, he was sure she went to Fillory without him. What if his childish notion wasn't wrong?





	The Lost Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/gifts).



When Quentin was eight, magic was real. In his hands, he had the keys to the kingdom of Fillory, five books stacks atop each other so high in his small arms that he could barely see over them, and he marched into another world to face all the dangers there.

Julia was the only person Quentin had ever met who loved Fillory as much as he did. When other people told them to shut up about it, Julia talked right over them. She wasn't scared of the Watcherwoman (Quentin would never admit it, but he was), and she wanted to be a Queen of Fillory when she grew up.

Quentin and Julia spent hours underneath the table where they'd drawn the map of Fillory and planned their trip. They'd walked through the Flying Forest, and they'd defeat the Watcherwoman at her own time games, and they were going to take seat on two of the four thrones of Whitespire. They were going to go, and they were going to have an adventure.

And one day, Julia disappeared.

Her face smiled down at him from the missing posters stapled to every telephone pole in town. His parents watched the news, and there she was, frozen in time in her third grade school picture with her pink rubber banded braces, and her sobbing mother begging for her baby back.

No one listened when Quentin told them she'd gone to FIllory. He just couldn't understand why she _went without him_.

Finally, Quentin's dad took him by the shoulders and said, "Stop it. This has to stop now, you're upsetting everyone. Fillory isn't real. It's a book. Julia's gone, she's not in a fairy tale. This is the real world, Q. You have to accept that."

Quentin stared at his father for a long time, and then nodded. He was eight and magic wasn't quite as real anymore. Not until Brakebills.

*****

"Oh my god, Fillory."

Quentin looked over to where Margo was raiding his bookshelves. He felt himself flush. He hadn't exactly invited Eliot and Margo into his room as much as they barged in with a couple bottles of wine, now empty, and were going through his things. Eliot was splayed out across Quentin's bed, half asleep, like he belonged there. Quentin actually didn't mind.

"Oh, yeah, I've had them since I was a kid," he tried lamely, hoping she wouldn't realize he'd been reading one just this morning.

She pulled _The Flying Forest_ off the shelf and clutched it to her chest. "I _loved_ these books."

"You did?" Quentin asked incredulously.

"Of course!" Margo flopped onto the bed, causing Eliot to moan a little. "What? Did you think you were the only one? You came to the school full of weirdos and social outcasts. We've all read them. Well, most of us anyway. Your Fillory, your Harry Potter, your Narnia, we all wanted to go to our own magical little place. Brakebills isn't _Fillory_ , but it makes a hell of a lot more sense now, doesn't it?"

"It does." Quentin took the book from her hands and flipped through it. The pages were soft and worn from use. "Penny went there, you know."

"I heard," Margo replied softly.

"It sucked, and I don't know how I feel about it anymore." Quentin rolled his eyes and snapped the book shut. "When I was a kid... I had this friend. We were obsessed with Fillory. We planned our trip, and we were certain we were gonna go. We had the whole thing planned out. We had this map we'd drawn on the underside of a table and... and one day, she disappeared. Just like the Chatwins did."

Margo's eyes widened with the realization of what he was saying. "You don't think your friend ended up in Fillory for real, do you?"

"I thought so, for a long time, I thought so, and I was so mad that she went without me. And one day my dad just... he broke it, you know? He told me it wasn't real and she'd been kidnapped and he didn't say that she was probably dead, but that's what he meant. They never found her."

Saying the words out loud, the thoughts he'd been thinking since the realization that Fillory was _real_ , it kind of scared him. He'd long put away the childish notion that Julia had disappeared to Fillory, he'd accepted that she'd died and he would never see her again. Now that Quentin knew Fillory was a real place, the dried up spring of hope began to blossom in his chest.

"Shit. Q, this is serious. I mean, what if she's the girl Penny's been seeing in the dungeon? What if she's trapped?" Margo reached over and took his hands. Minutes before, she'd seemed a little drunk, but now she was perfectly sober. "We have to get there."

Quentin could have cried with relief, and he might have if he wasn't still a little afraid of Margo. Finally, someone was thinking exactly what he was thinking.

*****

The girl in the dungeon's name was Victoria. She was a traveler like Penny. She wasn't Julia.

While Quentin hadn't _wanted_ for Julia to be locked up in a dungeon at the mercy of the Beast, he couldn't help but be disappointed. It wasn't her. He also didn't want her have been murdered when she was eight.

The hope receded a little, and Margo took his hand for a while as they walked. Everyone knew Quentin had another goal besides defeating the Beast, but no one quite got it like Margo did.

"Fillory's huge. Not just the kingdom, but the whole world of it," Quentin said quietly. "If she's here, she could be anywhere."

"But if she's here, you're closer now than you've been to her in years," Margo replied.

He looked over at her. "Well, when you put it like that..."

The hope bubbled up again.

*****

"I can't help you."

Quentin stared at the barkeep. Sure, he wasn't expecting a random bartender to pull a magic Beast-killing knife out of his back pocket and offer it to them freely. That would have been ridiculous. But he hoped for some information.

"You can't help us at all?"

The bartender looked around and then in a hushed tone said, "No one will help children of Earth around here. He turned them all out. And he has ears everywhere."

"The Beast?" Quentin asked.

"If that's what you call him. He wanted to be the only one, and as far as anyone can tell, only the Queen's left."

"Queen?" Penny repeated. "We were went by that castle, it's fucking empty."

The bartender smiled. "She's been lost since he took control. She was just a child on the throne, and she used her magic to hold him back for as long as she could until he overpowered her. Some say she died, but others say she took to the forest. Find her, and she may give you her blessing."

"We don't need a goddamn blessing--" Penny started, but Quentin cut him off.

"Thank you. That's very helpful." Quentin grabbed Penny's arm and tried to pull him out of the bar, but Penny wrenched it away just as quickly.

"What the fuck?"

"It's Julia."

*****

"Even if it is her, how are you going to find her?" Alice asked. "If she's hiding from the Beast, she'll be near impossible to find."

But Quentin wasn't listening to logic. He knew in his gut that this Queen was Julia, the same way he'd known that she'd gone to Fillory when they were eight. His entire body was humming with the possibility.

"I have to send out a signal. A regular summoning won't work, you're right, she'll be hiding too well, but, if, if--" Quentin paused to take a breath. "If she's here, I have to send her a sign that I'm here too."

Alice's brow furrowed with frustration. "I don't think you're listening."

"I don't think _you're_ listening," Margo snapped at her. "We're going to find this Queen, Julia or not. She's a Magician, and we can use all the firepower we can get."

"This is stupid," Penny muttered. "We need to get Victoria. _That's_ another Magician. Not a fairy tale."

"We're _in_ a fairy tale!" Quentin said. His hands clenched into fists. "Look, if you want to travel to Victoria, you want to get her out, you do that. But I'm going to do this. I don't care who's helping."

"Can you please stop shouting?" Elliot asked, flask in hand.

Margo stepped up next to Quentin. "I'm helping. We can send her a signal, one only she can see because it's bound to her. Do you have something of hers? Or something she gave you?"

Quentin's stomach plummeted. "It was a long time ago. I didn't think to -- wait." He dug around in his bag and he pulled out his battered copy of _The Girl Who Told Time_. It wasn't the first copy he owned, that was a nice hardcover edition. This one was a paperback, meant to get dirty and be read repeatedly. "I got this for my eighth birthday. From Julia."

Margo took it from him. "You were right. Fillory is huge, and if we just sent out a message to her she'd never get it. But we have an area. At least something we can aim it to. And this better work, because if it doesn't, you're going to be real mad."

"Why would I be mad?"

She set the book down on the ground and performed a series of intricate hand motions over it. The book promptly burst into flames.

Quentin stared at the fire that was once his book. He tried not to be mad, whether the spell worked or not. "It's supposed to do that, right?"

"So far..."

The orange flames flickered, and after a moment, the pyre turned a bright, vibrant blue. Margo grabbed Quentin's hand. "It's her. She's responding."

Penny scowled. "Or it's the Beast intercepting the call."

The flames rose, until the five of them were surrounding huge blue column of fire that rose high over their heads. No heat came off of it, and in fact, it seemed to emit a cool breeze.

"Tell me it's supposed to be doing that," Eliot said, his eyes wide. "Or did you just invent Filliorian air conditioning?"

Margo's eyes were wide. "I don't know."

Quentin stared into the fire. It hurt his eyes and his instinct was to blink, but he kept looking. "I think -- someone's in there."

Deep within the column stood a dark figure, and like a curtain parting, the flames opened and a woman in a long green dress appeared in front of them. Her dark hair was long and hung over her shoulders, with braids woven into her locks. The fire died immediately, leaving a slightly charred, but generally unharmed book on the ground.

But Quentin didn't care about the book. It had been thirteen years since he'd seen her, but he'd recognize her face anywhere. He'd been right. He'd been right the whole time.

"Julia."

*****

When Julia was eight, magic was real. She held portals to other worlds in her hands, and her favorite one was Fillory. She wanted to be High Queen when she grew up.

Like most things, being Queen was more difficult in real life than it was in a book.

"Julia."

She had been often summoned and hunted since she took refuge in the forest, ousted from her own castle. But nothing had called to her like the fire. It wasn't just something she could see, it was something she could feel. It was _hers_ , so deeply it hurt.

She stared at the man in front of her. There were others, but the one who said her name, his voice was like a memory from another life. It was. He was.

"Quentin?"

It seemed impossible, and yet here he was.

"Julia, oh my god." He grabbed her and pulled her into a hug. She tensed at first, and then relaxed in his embrace. She wrapped her arms around him. It was so strange, and yet so familiar, like the call of the signal. 

"I thought you were dead," Quentin gasped in her ear. "We all did. Your parents, you sister -- we all thought--"

Julia pulled back from him. "You thought I was dead? I kept waiting for you to come find me."

"No. I mean, I did, but I knew you weren't." He stammered over his words, but he reached out and grabbed her hand. "Why did you go without me?"

She couldn't answer. Instead, she looked around, and there were people staring at them. Strangers, others from Earth. Others like her, but not like her. They all were staring at her. She knew why they were here. Why Quentin was here.

"You've come to kill him, haven't you? It won't work."

"Maybe you just haven't been doing the right thing," one of the men said.

Julia bristled. She released Quentin's hand and approached the stranger. "How dare you? I've been holding him back my entire life. They brought me here for this and -- don't you think if he was killable, it would have been done?"

"Julia."

She turned her attention back to Quentin.

"Maybe if we help you we could kill him. We're Magicians."

*****

Julia lead the group through the forest. They'd all introduced themselves to her, and she had greeted them in kind, except for Penny, who earned only a scowl. He hadn't seemed offended, like he was used to it.

Quentin stepped in line next to her. "You said they brought you here -- who?"

"Fairies," she said faintly, like it was a silly thing to say. She wasn't sure why she was suddenly embarrassed. The last time she had spoken to Quentin, they talked about Cozy Horse of all things. Fairies were nothing compared to a horse with a bed for a back (who did not exist, at least to Julia's knowledge). Of course, they had been eight years old.

"Okay... why?"

She shrugged with one shoulder. "There was a man whose family had been ravaged by the Beast. He made a fairy deal for a child who had power over the Beast. He was weaker then and I didn't have any training, but I... I was able to banish him for a time. They made me Queen. There hasn't been a Queen in Fillory since the Chatwins. Technically, there's not one now."

"You're Queen all alone?" Quentin asked, a deep sadness in his voice. It touched her.

"I had my father -- the man who had made the deal. He helped until he passed. And there were others who taught me magic. I wasn't _alone_." Julia paused. "But I suppose it was lonely."

Quentin nodded. "Why you?"

She frowned. "I don't know."

"I wanted to come for you, you know. I didn't know how to get there. And everyone told me I was... I knew you'd gone to Fillory and you were having a big adventure."

Julia took his hand. "You were always the best friend I've ever had. I knew one day you'd come and find me. And here you are. Maybe this is what we need to kill the Beast. It's your turn for a big adventure."

Quentin squeezed her hand in return. "Our turn. Just like we always talked about."

She smiled. It was going to be better than what they daydreamed as children. They were going to fight. They were going to win. Together.


End file.
